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is becoming more readily available
from vast repositories, and analytics
and machine learning tools are making it possible to analyze the data and
make better sense of it.

Says Kibbe, “There is ever-betterinstrumentation and data acquisitionThe National Cancer Institute (NCI)and the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE)are collaborating on three pilot projectsthat involve using more intense high-performance computing at the exascalelevel, which is the push toward makinga billion billion calculations per second(or 50 times faster than today’s supercom-puters), also known as exaFLOPS (a quin-tillion, 1018, floating point operationsper second). The goal is to take years ofdata and crunch it to come up with bet-ter, more effective cancer treatments.

The DOE had been working on building computing infrastructure capable
of handling big data and entered into
discussions with the NCI, which houses massive amounts of patient data.
The two organizations realized there
were synergies between their efforts
and that they should collaborate.

The time is right for this particular
collaboration because of the application of advanced technologies like
next-generation sequencing, says Warren Kibbe, director of the NCI Center
for Biomedical Informatics and Information Technology. In addition, data

CombatingCancer With DataSupercomputers will sift massive amountsof data in search of therapies that work.